writing

Behind the Scenes of Blogging: Statistics

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

I want to take a little break from looking at language for this evening. Actually, I had tried to write something about language. I tried to write the post I’d mentioned yesterday: I wanted to start with the word English, and then let my phone choose which words would follow. I was hoping for some mad Dadaist poem, but was somewhat disappointed it was just recreating whole sentences from my blog or from emails. But then, having a look at my blog dashboard, and looking at other blogs, I decided to write about what I like about blogging. And when I started thinking about it, I realised I could write a lot, so I decided to focus on one aspect of the blogging experience: the statistics.

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Textspeak

Niall O'Donnell 23 Comments

Or txtspk I suppose, only, do so many people really use textspeak anymore, and therefore, is textspeak perhaps now more appropriate? I was thinking about this recently when someone communicated with me in classic txtspk, as in things like hi how r u, I wnt 2 da suprkmarkt 2day, it was gr8! It surprised me, partly because it wasn’t in a context in which I’d normally expect to encounter textspeak. Mostly though, it surprised me because it made me realise that I hadn’t come across someone using textspeak in a long time…

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The Dog Days of Summer

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

Look at Daisy up there, simply enjoying the warmth of the sun, as only a dog really can. What a life of simple joys a dog lives, one we can all be envious of. Seeing her like that yesterday made me think of the phrase the dog days of summer. A lot of people assume that it refers to the hottest period of the summer, in which dogs are too tired to do anything else but lie in the afternoon heat. I can see the logic in that, but as I’d never looked into the origin of the phrase, I thought now was as good a time as any to do so.

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The Most Beautiful Language in the World?

Niall O'Donnell 95 Comments

I read this article recently, suggesting that Italian is the most beautiful language in the world. I was intrigued, thinking that obviously the idea of beauty in any terms is going to be subjective, but I could also see why many people would choose Italian, so I read on.

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The Power of Prepositions

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

 No teacher likes to be observed. I still remember my first teaching practices when I was training to be a teacher. It was terrifying, because I’d never done anything remotely like teaching beforehand, and then suddenly had to stand up in front of a group of strangers and help them understand a list of words. This was made even worse by having an experienced teacher observe me, along with three fellow trainees. Being in that position really makes you doubt yourself. Whenever you see them make a note, you think about what you must have just done wrong, and hesitate about what to do next.

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A Tale of Three Translations

Niall O'Donnell 21 Comments

I was watching the news yesterday, and there was a story about the stone in the image above, which features the lyrics of the song “Galway Bay” in English, Latin, Irish, and French. It was erected, appropriately enough, in my hometown of Galway last year, overlooking Galway Bay, as part of a poetry trail featuring similar plaques with translations of works by different Irish writers. Funnily, I wasn’t really aware of the content of the plaque until yesterday, even though for most of last year I lived very close to it, and in fact passed it practically every day. I had seen it alright, but in my defence, I was usually cycling, driving, or running, so never really stopped to look at it, and there are many little cultural markers like that around the city, so you do kind of get used to them.

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The offending plaque, as it is now, in storage

Anyway, the issue with the plaque was with the Irish-language translation. A few months after it was erected, An Coimisinéir Teanga (the Language Commissioner) received a complaint about the quality of the Irish translation, which suggested that it didn’t capture the spirit of the original English-language lyrics. In a report, An Coimisinéir stated that there were approximately 40 errors in the 20 lines of the Irish version. I found this quite shocking, so had a look at the lyrics myself.

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I’ll Leave it in Your Inbox

Niall O'Donnell 21 Comments

I was thinking today about the books I’ve bought but have yet to read, and about how to describe those books. My instinct was to refer to them as my to-do list, but then I decided that that didn’t really work, because they’re not a list. This is the point where most people would stop thinking about it, because it wasn’t even part of a conversation anyway. Nevertheless, I persisted, and thought about the word inbox as a possibility. Yes, that made sense. I get them, put them in the imaginary inbox until I take one, read it, and then transfer it to my imaginary outbox. Good, so the pile of books beside my bed (and the others in the other room: there are a lot of them) is my inbox. Not that I stopped thinking there though.

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